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She can feel the chill of the ocean even two hundred feet above it. Icy water droplets infuse the wind and augment its bitterness, galling her exposed skin with the same force that abrades the concrete walls of the fortress behind her. She is trembling so hard that it is difficult to keep her balance. One foot slips and she falls into a crouch at the cliff’s edge, her eyes transfixed by the waves that crash and roll below, colder and vaster and blacker than the night.
Now… she tells herself. You must do it now, before they find you…
The gusting wind tosses her long hair. It too is indecisive, one moment pulling the tangled locks forward, as though to drag her into the waves, and the next moment pushing them backward, repelling her from the edge. She clings to the damp rock like a half-drowned moth. She has lost so much weight in the past weeks that her pale arms look like bones, and she fears that the wind will clutch her and whirl her away over the edge before she is ready.
The waves are dark with fury and defiance, but from within their broiling, foaming depths she can sense a formless thing calling out to her.
Your peace is here. Come find it. Leave this empty world…it is meaningless now…it is meaningless…
She wants desperately to obey, but her cowardly, rebellious body will not let her “ it suddenly wants only the cold night air, the sound of the ocean, the feel of the wet rock beneath her fingers. Not yet “ she is not ready yet. She backs away from the edge. One more moment will be enough, only to breathe once more the sea air, to see one last time the light from a distant sunrise, tinging the horizon with a rose and gold blush. That light must come soon...
Even before she opened her eyes, she knew where she was. All of her senses told her. She could feel the cold floor as it pressed against her back uncomfortably; she could smell the mold that clung to the decaying walls, and hear the muffled sound of waves against stone, like a distant battle. She could even see the darkness through her closed eyelids, before she opened them and recognized the blank stone ceiling of her cell in Azkaban.
She wondered briefly whether the last two years had been a dream. Perhaps he had never returned, and she was still awaiting him in her prison cell, his selfless, patient martyr, every beat of her weary heart dedicated to him. But something was different. Her body, which should have been accustomed to sleeping on the stone floor, was aching and crying out for a bed’s softness; the mold-smell to which she had once habituated herself now made her wrinkle her nose. Her head hurt, too, as though she had hit it on something. She reached a hand up to feel her left temple and cringed; it was swollen and bruised.
What had happened? She closed her eyes again and tried to summon her last memory. The Dark Lord had waited for the boy in the forest…The Dark Lord had tried to kill him and had failed…They were in the Great Hall at Hogwarts and she was fighting at the Dark Lord’s side…She was casting curses at the redheaded woman...She was taunting her…
And a red jet of light hit her in the chest…
She grimaced in pain and pushed herself to a sitting position. She had fallen in battle, then. She had been captured and brought back here. But that meant “
“He’s dead.”
The words tumbled out, as if the jailor leering at her through the barred door of her cell had been waiting hours to say them. She stared at him, her dark eyes blank; her newly-reassembled thought process had been brought to a halt.
“I said he’s dead. Your boss. V-Voldemort.”
“He can’t be,” she said, her voice quieter and less certain than she had intended it. But she had to be right. He had assured her that he could not be killed, that he had done something to make himself invincible. She knew it had something to do with the snake, Nagini, but the details were a mystery, and she had not been senseless enough to ask him to share his secrets.
There was a triumph in the guard’s laughter that sounded truly evil. “It’s over. Look at your arm, sweetie.”
She pulled back her ragged sleeve and felt the blood drain from her face. There was nothing there but pale skin.
The Dark Mark had disappeared.
Her first reaction was numbness; she said nothing, and her face had betrayed no emotion. The guard must have been disappointed, because he stopped jeering at her. She slumped back against the wall of the cell, clutched her knees to her chest, and stared at nothingness.
Dead…
He was dead. Gradually the truth sank in, like the chill of ice against warm skin. Not defeated, not outcast, not torn from his body as before…but dead. He was dead and he had left her, defeated at the hands of an ignorant, lucky child.
Dead, dead, dead…the word echoed in her mind until it became farcical. This was absurd. He had promised her that he would never die…He had reassured her, after she had nearly collapsed in tears at his feet…after she had warned him not to face Potter or Dumbledore again until he was certainhe had enough power...after he had taken her chin in his hand and promised her…
How could a person be dead, anyway? She wondered what he was feeling right now, where he was, whether he was, at all. She had never believed in an afterlife, really. Mother and Father had taught her about Heaven, and her younger sisters, Cissy and Meda, had believed in it, but she had never been able to bring herself to. It seemed too good to be true, too fanciful, something believed in only by children and priests. And when Father had died, she had tried to picture him in Heaven, but it had never seemed real enough. It was easier to picture him where he was…under the earth, nibbled and explored by worms. Was the Dark Lord there? What had become of his body?
She could remember the depths of misery into which she had sunk after Father’s funeral. The world had seemed hateful and purposeless.
It was there…buried in some unmarked grave somewhere, or burned, transformed into ashes. His eyes, his mouth, his hands…now ashes, gone. At some point it had hit her and she had broken down in tears.
The next several weeks were the worst of her life. There were no Dementors anymore, but every moment she felt as though they were surrounding her. As the days passed she stopped eating, and her pale arms began to grow thinner; the healthy weight that she had regained since escaping from Azkaban quickly left her. She neither knew nor cared what events transpired outside. Sometimes she thought that she heard people speaking to her, but she was not interested in anything they said.
One night, during a sea storm that made the very concrete of the fortress shudder and sway, she noticed that the door to her cell was slightly ajar. One of her jailors had been bringing her food and water, and had rushed off, alarmed by the wind’s damage, before securing the barred door. She rose shakily to her feet and slipped out. Down the hall she could see the main entrance; beyond it was the wind and the cliffs and the seaspray, and a drop that could end her misery forever…
The waves continue to beckon, and she continues to hesitate.
The wind rips and tears at her prison rags. The waves crash again and again, hypnotically, against the base of the cliff.
Were she still able to, she would smile at the absurdity of the situation. She has never been afraid to die before. The thought of it has never daunted her. She would even have been glad to die, had it been for him. But now, now, when there is nothing left in the world for which to live, she does not want to leave it.
And finally she understands. This is not the first time that she has stared into the blackness of the ocean. This is not the first time that the emptiness has frightened her. No “ she has seen it many times “ in the shiny surface of Father’s coffin, in the blankness of the stone wall, in the eyes of the dead as they were dragged from their cells. She believed in him, worshipped him, loved him, only to distract herself from that black ocean. She had pretended it was not there. But now that he is gone, she can see it rolling before her, reaching away to the horizon, clawing at the base of the little rock where she crouches in terror.
Everyone in the world “ everyone who had ever lived “ had done the same thing, in their way. Those who strove for immortality and those who tried to stop them, those who fought in the name of purity and of equality, of power and of justice, of Darkness and of Light “ every quest was a distraction, an attempt to look away from the emptiness, the worthlessness, the meaninglessness, to deny that every man and woman on earth would one day be swept into the howling depths of an uncaring ocean.
When the wind has blown the last of the tears from her eyes, she feels as though she has awakened from a dream. There is no sunrise and she no longer expects one. The ocean continues to swirl beneath her, but it no longer makes her feel entranced. She feels instead the bitter wind against her flesh, the wet rock beneath her fingers, her heart beating within her chest, and for the first time in her life, she feels that it is enough.
She can hear the shouts of the guards now, faint against the still-crying wind. Slowly she stands and returns to her prison “ to mourn, to feel, to suffer…and to live.